Vox Media will acquire New York Media, the company behind New York Magazine and a series of other publications, in an all-stock transaction.  “No one had to do this,” says Pamela Wasserstein, CEO of New York Media, said on Tuesday. “It’s a brilliant, in our view, opportunity, so that’s why we leaned into it. It’s not out of need. It’s out of ambition.” (more…)

Artist Cameron Rowland, Mel Chin and Jeffrey Gibson have been awarded MacArthur Genius Grants. “I finished the call and sat there dumbfounded,” Gibson says. “I’m familiar with MacArthur, but I never even knew how it worked.” (more…)

The NYT reports on the work of artist Ben Enwonwu, the Nigerian artist who is among the nation, and the continent’s most famous, as the market for his work continues to appreciate. “I’m very happy that my father is getting his due, but there’s still a long way to go,” said the artist’s son Oliver Enwonwu. (more…)

Kara Walker gets a profile in the Guardian this week, as she prepares to open her Tate Modern Turbine Hall Commission. “The Turbine Hall is like a grand prize,” she says. “You’ve been offered this gargantuan space and it’s all yours. It’s irresistible.”  (more…)

After 13 years as director of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Lawrence Rinder will step down. “For more than a decade, Lawrence Rinder has been an outstanding leader of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, amplifying the museum’s international reputation and deepening its public impact through programming that advances the highest creative and intellectual aspirations of UC Berkeley,” says Carol Christ, the chancellor of the University of California Berkeley. (more…)

Bruce W. Ferguson, the first director of SITE Santa Fe, has died at 73. A groundbreaking curator, he pioneered a unique approach to art and exhibition-making that established SITE as a major force in the American Southwest. (more…)

Art News profiles the art collection of the artist KAWS, as the artist continues to grow in stature. “He sees art without prejudice and hierarchies, on a very honest level,” says Wendy Olsoff, co-founder of P.P.O.W. “He sees the sincerity and individualism of each artist.” (more…)

A Renaissance masterwork by Cimabue has been discovered in a small kitchen outside Paris, The Gaurdian reports.  “I had a week to give an expert view on the house contents and empty it,” consultant Philomène Wolf says of discovering the work. “I had to make room in my schedule … if I didn’t, then everything was due to go to the dump.” (more…)

Gagosian is appealing a lawsuit against collector Steven A. Tananbaum over an  alleged failure to deliver three works by Jeff Koons. In its statement on an appeal, the gallery argued Tananbaum was “well aware of Koons’ perfectionism.” (more…)

A piece in Daily Beast looks at the new Pace Gallery space, and asks how the art world might evolve in the years to come.  “We do not believe that the big galleries have the capacity to edge out all these small and medium-size galleries,” Marc Glimcher said. “They may have the economic power to do it. But they don’t have the capacity to replace what those galleries are doing. So we know that something can happen. The market is very imperfect.  So our answer is that we’re very collaborative, we are very dedicated to working with medium and small galleries.” (more…)

The Independent NY Fair has announced the 63 galleries that will show work in its 2020 edition at Spring Studios, including twenty-one of the exhibitors are first-time participants. (more…)

Pope.L’s performance Conquest took place this weekend at Corporal John A. Seravalli Playground, with over a hundred participants crawling across the ground. “I just want to introduce some controversy,” the artist said. “This is not my crawl. Yeah, I know it’s what it says on the sign. But today, I’m giving it away. I want to share the pain.” (more…)

Olafur Eliasson has been named a Goodwill Ambassador of the UN’s Development Program. “Life on Earth is about co-existence—among people, non-human animals, ecosystems, and the environment,” he says. “Co-existence is beautiful and generative, chaotic and challenging. The fact is, we’re in it together. That’s why we all have to take the climate emergency seriously.” (more…)

The New York Times profiles Trevor Paglen’s recent project ImageNet Roulette, and its critiques of AI-driven data analysis. “We want to show how layers of bias and racism and misogyny move from one system to the next,” Paglen says. “The point is to let people see the work that is being done behind the scenes, to see how we are being processed and categorized all the time.” (more…)

The Sao Paulo Bienal has announced its first round of projects, focused around a range of solo shows opening months before the main exhibition.  Projects include a show of work by Ximena Garrido-Lecca, Clara Ianni, Deana Lawson, and a never-before-realized Hélio Oiticica performance to be staged at the opening of the main group show. (more…)

Art News profiles recent work by LaToya Ruby Frazier documenting the closure of a GM plant in Ohio and the resulting protests. “When I saw the news, I was moved because I understood the calamity that this was going to create,” she says. “I knew they were going to reduce these workers to statistics based on shares and stocks, and no one was going to pay attention to their livelihood.” (more…)

The Dia Art Foundation will offer free admission across all New York City sites starting in September 2020. “Our inaugural season will take full advantage of our revitalized and light-filled exhibition spaces at Dia:Chelsea,” says director Jessica Morgan. “It will also reflect the evolution of our program, which today embraces a broader stable of artists and perspectives while still exploring the formal pillars central to artists working at the time of Dia’s establishment.” (more…)

Painter Peter Saul will have his first New York museum survey, opening on February 11 at the New Museum. “We live in a world that resembles the absurdity of Peter Saul’s paintings,” says Massimiliano Gioni, the museum’s artistic director. (more…)

A new study has found that only 2% of global art auction spending is on work by women. “When we set out to do this project, we were excited to track just how much things had changed for female artists,” syas Julia Halperin, artnet News executive editor. “So, it was quite disheartening for us to find that the numbers remained so low, and there had been so little measurable change. But we can’t solve a problem until we acknowledge it exists, and this project serves as an important reminder that we have a long way to go before we reach parity.” (more…)

Anne Imhof has released the soundtrack to her Golden Lion-winning performance Faust through Berlin experimental club label PAN. (more…)

Art Institute of Chicago head James Rondeau is featured in Art Newspaper this week, as he holds court on his vision of the museum of the future. “Visitors recognize themselves more and more in our collections, exhibitions, and programming, but we must go beyond that and reimagine how our spaces themselves can telegraph: ‘This is your experience,'” he says. (more…)

Italian bank UniCredit will sell 312 works in an effort to raise €50m to fund a Social Impact Banking initiative, Art Market Monitor reports. The first set of works will sell in London in the coming weeks. (more…)

Jerry Saltz pens a piece in NY Mag this week trumpeting the return of the TriBeCa art scene, as a range of galleries open in the neighborhood. “Against all odds, can New York have a good art neighborhood with a walkable density of galleries?” He asks.  “Galleries with wooden floors, flaws, and funny footprints, which are more like where artists actually make art than all those perfect, concrete-floored slick showrooms?” (more…)

The Whitney has broken ground on David Hammons’s Day’s End (2020), a permanent install across from the museum in the southern edge of Gansevoort Peninsula.  The piece is referred to by the artist as a “ghost monument” to Gordon Matta-Clark’s 1975 work of the same name in the same location. (more…)